The Penultimate Post

Hello blogosphere.  It has been longer than I intended between posts (things have been bastante ocupado here in Monteverde).  Some highlights of the past two weeks:

1) Cooking and consuming the best egg-in-a-nest of my life in a passive solar oven that another student made for EcoFest, a festival we put on a week ago (cook time: 2 hrs)

2) Got a gig playing at Sushi and Jazz Night at a local hotel last night with my friend Megan, who is an incredible singer.  Musicmaking and merrymaking ensued.

3) Took some finals, two more to go.

4) Ate chicharones (fried pig skins) for what will probably be the last time in a long time.  They're pretty delicious, but it's hard to shake the notion that one is essentially eating breaded bacon chunks.  You can pretty much feel them doing harm to your body.

5) Been seeing motmot birds all over the place.  They look like this:

Tomorrow I'm headed to Upala, a rural town where my host grandparents live.  It'll be refreshing to get out into the country and relax after all our finals are done.  Then I come back to MV to pack and Monday will find all of us traveling once more back to Alajuela, where we will part ways, some to travel in CR and Nicaragua and others to take that northing flight home.  My six hour layover in Dallas will be quite a change from 3 months spent in almost constant contact with either fellow students or my host family.  I think I'll probably buy a crossword puzzle book to pass the time (I have become addicted to NYtimes crosswords here, thanks to my friend Leah).

Anyway, I never got around to posting about our time with the BriBri near the Panamanian border, so here goes.  Centuries ago, the BriBri lived in what is now Panama, but they migrated Northward over time, largely to avoid Spanish settlement.  This migration led them into more and more mountainous terrain (where Spaniards didn't see it as worth it to pursue), and the community we visited, Yorkín, is located along a river in the foothills of the Talamanca Mountains.  

To get to Yorkín, we piled into well-worn canoes equipped with 15 horsepower outboard motors, each with a motor-operator in the stern and a poler in the bow.  These guys worked harder than anyone I have ever seen in my life, masterfully guiding the canoe through what seemed like the only navigable channel in an extremely shallow river, with the motor guy bodily lifting the motor out of the water in rocky patches to prevent propellor damage (they have to replace their propellors twice a year).

When we got to Yorkín, many of us were surprised to see another group of extranjeros staying in the community, but we soon found out that a women's group in the community started an ecotourism organization in the 1990s called STIBRAWPA (BriBri for women artisans), which has been largely responsible for a marked upswing in socioeconomic opportunities in the region.  They are visited by 1000 people each year.

STIBRAWPA was formed following the mass exodus of the BriBri workforce from Yorkín that was the result of the advent of the monilia fungus, which reduced annual cacao yield (their primary cash crop) by up to 70%.  Most of the men of the community were forced to seek work elsewhere, and (predictably) they found it on banana plantations and oil refineries, where their daily proximity to chemicals had sweeping adverse health effects.  However, the rise of STIBRAWPA expanded the cacao/banana agroforestry system to include ecotourism dollars, which has stabilized the local economy and allowed most of these men to return.  Furthermore, women have gained a lot of respect in the community and have made great strides in reducing the influence of machisto culture in the region.

Tourists who come to the area often come for just one day, but some (like us) stay for 4 days to a week.  Visitors experience first hand the process of turning cacao fruit into chocolate, take a BriBri language lesson, eat meals cooked by wood fire in an open air dining room, and many do some volunteer work (we helped continue the building of a new trail), all the while getting to know the area and the people of Yorkín.  

One can see the strange pressures of indigenous authenticity at work.  On our second to last afternoon, a teenager wearing a Nike brand tanktop and flat-brimmed backwards baseball cap was teaching a middle-aged French nurse how to use a bow and arrow (it was unclear to me in all our time there if the BriBri even use bows and arrows).  As I was watching in the dining area, one of the BriBri women who was taking a break from the kitchen answered a cell phone that was blasting a Shakira ringtone.  It is unfair for tourists to expect total cultural isolation and preservation, yet its subtle influences are evident, and even more curiously, if one looks a little closer, it is apparent that the BriBri are well aware that what they are selling is their culture, and they take many subtle steps to highlight their indigenous identity. 

That's about all she wrote for now.  I'll close out the blog with a final post when I return stateside early next week.  Thanks to all of you who kept up, and sorry for the long lapses in posting.  It's been a fun jaunt in the blogosphere, though I am not sure if it's a medium I'm cut out for, ha.  This last picture is of our logistics coordinator, Rolo, who organized both trips we took this semester.  He is kind of like a Tico uncle to me, and is one of the people I will miss the most when I come back home.  I hope you all are well.

Viaje Terminado

I apologize for the longer than usual lapse in posting.  We returned yesterday from our second two-week trip, which took us to Nicaragua and along the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, visiting pineapple plantations, agroforestry operations and coral reefs.  The primary foci of the trip were agricultural practices and forest management.  I am going to split the trip into two blog entries because there is a lot to say (and my aunt invited me over for cafe and rice pudding this afternoon, so I have limited time).

We spent the first three days of our field trip in a riverside Nicaraguan town called El Castillo (the castle).  The town's namesake is a castle/fort atop a hill overlooking the river.  It was built by the Spanish in the 1500s to provide security for trade routes during the golden age of Caribbean piracy.  Interestingly, the San Juan river, which runs by the town, was initially considered a prime candidate for an aquatic trade shortcut from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but political strife and seismological activity spurred foreign investors to look farther south to Panama and construct their historical canal.

Our next destination was a beautiful and remote location called Giovanni's, a rustic forest lodge in the northeastern lowlands of Costa Rica.  Giovanni himself is a mysterious, manically industrious and pensive man with a mischievous sense of fun and adventure.  He has been protecting his holding of mostly primary forest for years and has made a living in everything from carpentry to butterfly farming.  He has open disdain for the trappings of modern life and talks about the minimal fees he pays for light and phone with a face as though he had just eaten something disagreeable.  Yet he has an almost childlike sense of wonder about nature, and approaches what he perceives as his given mission of forest protection with a quasi-religious fervor.  His place is beautiful and peaceful, and reminded me a lot of the Homestead, with its wood stoves, hammocks and mismatched coffee mugs.

Some of us helped grill kebabs and burgers one night, accompanied by the laughing voices of the children of Giovanni's friends and the sounds of the woods.  Everyone had worked up an appetite that afternoon swimming in a nearby river, swinging on rope swings into the water and playing around on some river kayaks, and we thoroughly enjoyed the bounty of the grill.  The idyllic joie de vive of Giovanni's was emphasized in contrast to the ever-expanding pineapple plantations that continue to replace forest and cattle farms alike in the Saripiqui area, and along the Caribbean slope in general.  The tour we took of a nearby plantation that supplies Dole with both organic and conventional pineapple left a little to be desired in the way of accurate information, and we felt thoroughly ridiculous drinking virgin Piña coladas out of pineapples at the end of the morning (though we certainly found plenty of humor in the situation).  Also, much of the decor was pineapple themed:

We persuaded Giovanni to accompany us on the remainder of our trip, the next stop of which was Cahuita, a coastal town with a National Park notable for its coral reefs.  We went snorkeling for a few hours one morning, which was awesome since I have only ever been snorkeling in the Great Lakes, and though they have cool shipwrecks, they have nowhere near the biodiversity present in the tropics. 

That's all for now (time for rice pudding!), but stay tuned for another post soon about our time with the BriBri, an indigenous group near the Panamanian border.  On an unrelated note, I will leave you with a picture of the finished retaining wall (complete with artistic improvement and beer can planters awaiting plants).

Earthbag, Mirthswag

TGIF.  Tomorrow marks our only free weekend of the entire program.  Although I entertained the idea of accompanying a few friends on a trip somewhere, I think I'm going to take a much needed break from the whirlwind nature of the program's structure and have a slow weekend of hiking and decompressing.  I wish I could camp somewhere, but almost all land is privately owned around here, which makes things difficult. We'll see.

Last Sunday I got the chance to see the nursery/reforestation project where my host dad works several days a week.  It is in the country just outside of Monteverde on land that used to belong to a handful of cattle farmers.  Being away from touristy (though beautiful and fun) Monteverde proper made me realize that I have been sorely missing open country, so it was a welcome breath of uncluttered air.  Lorenzo (my host dad) and I took a brief hike to a waterfall on the property, which was beautiful, and the cleanest I've ever seen since it is only 50 meters from the stream's source spring.  Then he took me to the station run by the reforestation foundation, which had rocking chairs on a porch overlooking the valleys to the West.  It was easily the best view I have seen in the Monteverde region and as Lorenzo said "La unica lo que falta es una cerveza en la mano."  (the only thing missing is a beer in my hand).

So far, both the experimental and control beds of lettuce seem to be growing pretty well.  It's too soon to draw many meaningful conclusions though, so we'll have to wait until after our next two week trip (i.e. three weeks from now) to see if the organic/synthetic mix is a viable alternative to 100% synthetic fertilizer.  While we're waiting, I am working mornings at the greenhouse.  Although it's repetitive work (mostly cleaning lettuce beds after harvest, removing roots and leaf litter), it's methodical and therapeutic.  Plus, working there has its benefits.  I've been able to improve my rice/beans lunches immensely with the addition of delicious cherry tomatoes and basil, and I've been able to supply pitchers of refreshing mint/lime water out to the retaining wall crew, which I've also been working with in the late mornings.

The wall project is proving hard but rewarding, and the technique is really interesting.  It's called earthbag or superadobe construction and was developed by an Iranian-Californian architect as an entry in a lunar domicile construction contest held by NASA.  It is based on the idea of using locally available materials to create housing, and did well in the NASA contest because the vast majority of the materials wouldn't have to be expensively carried by shuttle to the site, but rather collected on the moon itself.  The basic idea is that you use long bags of the material used to bag agricultural feed, stuffing them with an earth-concrete or earth-lime mix.  You build them up in layers, tamping each one and letting it harden.  Each layer is connected to the next with barbed wire, and the finished product is a dome or collection of domes (when building a house, we are just using it to build a retaining wall).  Interestingly, it has been re-pitched not as lunar housing but as an emergency shelter option in post-disaster or war-stricken areas.  It can use materials of war (barbed wire, trench dirt) to create homes, and quickly too (with community efforts).  Here's an example of a finished but unplastered structure:

And here is a picture of Michelle and Carrie working on our wall:

I am looking forward to using this technique to design a new outbuilding for our cats at the Homestead this fall so they have warm shelter for the winter (and so they don't poop all over our common spaces in the people cabins).  If you are as interested in superadobe as I am, you should check out this website:
http://calearth.org/building-designs/what-is-superadobe.html

In other news, at a coffee farm we visited recently, I saw/used a nice composting toilet!

Well, that about wraps her up for now, I suppose.  Pura vida.

Bats and Greens and Coffee Beans

Last Friday/Saturday we visited a nearby nature reserve to learn about mammals.  Especially fascinating was the evening activity of netting and learning about bats (murciélagos).  One particularly interesting bat species has an incredibly detailed reproductive behavior.  Each male tries to attract a harem of females to its arboreal habitat and, once successful, tries to keep them around by hovering a few feet away facing them and singing a complex song.  Evolution sure has created some weirdly intricate biological patterns.

On Sunday, I cooked dinner for my family as planned: risotto wrapped in lettuce accompanied by rosemary olive oil bread and white wine from a box.  This made me nostalgic for the homestead, but luckily I had leftover bread to tide me over for the next few days.  As a side note, the Clos brand of boxed wine here is better and cheaper than the reasonably priced bottled wines (top score).

Here is a photograph of our growing lettuce plants (synthetically fertilized control bed for our experiment).  The signs are to dissuade prodding by greenhouse visitors.  We have been using the down time between data collection to prepare other beds for normal greenhouse produce and to create signage for all of Orlando's vegetables and herbs.  These signs will include origin, nutritional info and culinary/medicinal uses.  

I played piano at Vitosi (nearby drug store) again on Sunday.  This time I played for around an hour and a half, and after a while they even turned off the radio (which I took as a tacit complement).  A highlight of the day was overhearing two retirees quietly singing along while I played a jazzed version of the sesame street theme song.  

Tomorrow we will be investigating the methodologies/ideologies of two big coffee interests in the Monteverde region, which should be interesting/tasty.  Unfortunately, it means yet another jam-packed Saturday.  The program provides a lot of cool opportunities but I think all of us wish we had a little more unstructured play/exploration time.

There's a café nearby that has a book exchange program, which I have been taking advantage of.  I recently traded for Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which I am stoked to start it (never read any Faulkner before).  

In other news, I am excited to be helping with another internship happening here at the Study Center: a SuperAdobe retaining wall.  I hope to implement the technique to build a dome-shaped outbuilding at the Homestead that can function as an improved Cabin Cat (Ohio winter is hard on outdoor felines).  I'll post pictures of the process when I have them, but for now I'll leave it at that.

Well, it's been a long week, so several of us are gonna check out a nearby tapas/cocktails place called Chimera.  (Mojito+fried yucca=sonrisas)  Hasta luego.

Haleh shoma chetoreh?

While here in Costa Rica, I have been steadily improving my Spanish.  I would estimate that I can now speak with the proficiency of a precocious 4 year old with some knowledge of specialized agricultural vocabulary.  I knew when I signed up that I would get the chance to learn the language of old España.  What I didn't know was that I would also get a chance to learn some Farsi phrases.  My friend Michelle's family are Persian Oklohomans (globalization=real, QED), and she's been teaching me various simple phrases, such as "How are you?" (Haleh shoma chetoreh?) and "Your father is a dog," (Pedar sag).  It's a fun language to speak, with lots of guttural "h" sounds.  In other worldly news, I met a British woman at the bar last night who arrived in Monteverde a week ago after a month working at a Honduran orphanage.  After several years working as a criminal lawyer in London, she grew disillusioned with her job, quit it and has been backpacking in Central America since.  It was inspiring to talk to someone brave enough to take the time and effort to take a serious re-evaluation break and search for a new path.

This is a picture of the hydroponic greenhouse where I am currently working/experimenting.  It's in a montane pine forest and from the top of the slope you can look out over the treetops to the Gulf of Nicoya.  In all honesty, the experiment has a kind of hurry up and wait feel to it, so we have lots of time to do other things around and for the greenhouse.  On the first day, we resaturated the volcanic rock substrate for the beds we are using for our experiment.  Then, we measured and counted the leaves on 260 lettuce seedlings before planting them.  Each one has a gridded identity (e.g. K4) so we can track progress in lettuce grown with synthetic fertilizer and lettuce grown with a 1:1 mix of synthetics and organic worm waste.  While we wait for them to grow, we are keeping busy by translating the garden's webpage into English, making informative signs for the 22 different plants Orlando is currently growing, and clearing the beds of the roots of already harvested lettuce.

One of the benefits of my internship at Hídroponicas de Monteverde is delicious fresh produce to bring home.  I have started a few mornings with a delicious lettuce leaf full of cherry tomatoes (yum).  I got some lettuce and rosemary to bring home today because I am cooking dinner for my host family on Sunday.  I am planning on making mushroom risotto to be eaten in lettuce wrap form (hooray for finger food) and rosemary olive oil bread (all the bread here is flat or Wonder-type sandwich fog, so my mouth is watering at the thought of a hefty loaf).

Tonight we are headed to a nearby Reserve in order to take a night hike and observe different types of mammals.  A focus of the night will be bats, or murciélagos, which we will be netting and studying up close.  Unfortunately, we will be missing the TexMex Fiesta at Bar Amigos, which includes (among other things) un toro mecánico and live music by a band that goes by the name of Los Alegres Veteranos (the happy veterans).  Qué lástima! (what a shame).

I have been researching common vegetables in the processes of creating signage for Orlando's greenhouse and have learned many novel pieces of trivia.  For example:

1) spinach originated in Persia
2) a famous British officer, Field Marshal Montgomery, coined an obscure euphemism for visiting prostitutes: "Well lads, we have two days leave.  Best take care if you plan to take favours in the beet fields."
3) Mint captures free testosterone in the bloodstream, so it is sometimes used to treat hirsutism in women

Well, as Tigger would say, TTFN.

He Vuelto a Monteverde

Que pasa, interweb?  It's been a while.  We returned last night from our two week trip along Costa Rica's Pacific Coast.  It was jam-packed, with each day scheduled from 7am til around 9pm.  That said, we did get a few nice breaks, especially to enjoy the small beach town of Playa Grande.  The trip was bookended by visits to hydropower plants.  We began our travels in the Northwest, where we visited Lake Arenal, a man-made reservoir, and learned about the dam system that created it.   We heard about many of the dam's ecological effects, including changing dynamics among fish populations and water diversion from the Atlantic to the Pacific slope.  Interestingly, Costa Rica is atypical in that 80% of its electricity is generated by hydropower (compare to roughly 15% in the U.S., which is still proportionally high in global terms).  ICE (the government controlled electricity and telecommunications company) is about to begin construction on a new dam that will double the nation's energy capacity.  It is called the Diquis project and is located in the Southwest.  We spent yesterday learning about it from ICE's perspective and then spent the afternoon talking with schoolchildren and community members in a the town of Ceibo, which will be entirely submerged when the dam is built.  It was a sobering afternoon, but practicing our Spanish with the kids helped us keep a hopeful attitude.  It's true, after all, that ICE is undertaking an incredible variety of projects designed to ease social and ecological costs incurred by the Diquis dam, but it is still clear that with repercussions on such a grand scale, it is near impossible for them to navigate the transition smoothly.

We also visited sites of high geothermal activity.  One was within a National Park and the other was nearby, but outside of the park's boundaries.  Consequently, this latter is now the site of a geothermal power plant.  It will be interesting to see what happens with the geothermal sector in CR, as only one plant currently exists, but areas with geothermal potential abound.

In the middle of the trip, we visited Palo Verde National Park, which includes lots of wetland habitat that is ideal for birding.  There are 850 avian species that call CR home for at least part of the year, and in just three hours with the help of three expert birders, small groups were able to spot over 50 of them!  It was undoubtedly nerdy, but just as undoubtedly fun, and I'm looking forward to learning a lot more about temperate species (I'm sad to say I could only identify around ten birds total prior to Bird Day).

We then spent three days on Isla Chira in the Gulf of Nicoya, which was a welcome break from the 3 restaurants a day, hotel-hopping spree of the first week.  We stayed in a homey, rustic lodge made up of cabins and a small semi-enclosed dining hall.  It was nice to be able to do some sink laundry and relax in the woods.  While on the island, we visited two similar local groups involved in fishing and clamming.  The artisanal (hook-and-line) fishing group has been really successful in establishing sustainable practices in their protected area of the Gulf, and have been hailed as a model for other communities trying to do the same.  The clamming group, on the other hand, met with initial success but had lots of problems with protecting their clamming grounds after a series of news media promos brought a lot of poachers to the area.  Sadly, much of this downturn has to do with the fact that the group is run by women, and the men poaching the clams do not respect their authority when they patrol.  The women have changed gears from clamming, or "piangua"-ing, to offering tours of the mangroves that provide clam habitat, incorporating clam digging into them as well.  It was a definite highlight of the trip.  We all suited up and squelched thro ugh the mud, jumping nimbly (or not-so-nimbly) along the tough but pliable gigantic root systems of the mangrove trees in search of clams.  Once back on the boat, we had delicious clam ceviche (similar to pico de gallo), easily the best dish I've had since arriving in the country.

On the subject of food on the island, we also ate beans prepared in this super cool solar cooker:

This post is getting pretty long, I suppose.  Breifly, then, other highlights included our bus breaking down on the second to last day and getting stranded outside of a tuna factory for a couple hours.  It was during this time that we ate at a soda (i.e. cafe) that gave many of us indigestion (three cheers for Tums).

Fortunately, zen average held and we were rewarded the following morning with an early morning breakfast cruise along a beautiful river.

We start internships tomorrow, so I'll be learning lots about hydroponic gardening, which I'm looking forward to.  Now I'm off to put some pages behind me in the mediocre Spanish novel that I have a quiz on in two days.

Avian Dreams/Realities

I have had a few bird dreams lately, possibly as a result of eating chickens I have known.  The most recent was this morning, as I dreamt that my Mama Tica (Yolanda) was in the shed, killing a panicking duck for us to eat for that night's dinner.  Strangely, upon waking I discovered that she had essentially done the opposite by saving and caring for a runt chick that wasn't being cared for by its mother hen.  Every morning is a wrestling match between murky dreams and sun-spangled reality.

Today we have a rare reprieve from the daily whirlwind grind.  We have the whole afternoon and evening off, ostensibly to finish our internship proposals, but I finished mine yesterday so I'm enjoying the prospect of a free afternoon.  I will probably walk over to Santa Elena in order to pick up a few supplies for our upcoming two-week trip, which begins on Sunday.  We will be spending time in many towns along the length of the Pacific Coast, including San Isidro del General near the southwestern Osa (Bear) Peninsula, a few towns along the Gulf of Nicoya (NW), and even a field station on Isla Chira (3 days).  I am excited to see more of the country, especially since we will have the opportunity to visit many places that wouldn't be available to tourists.  The trip is focused on thematic content related to water and energy production/consumption, and we will be visiting a geothermal plant, a biofuel station, and a few hydroelectric plants.  We will also be studying turtles, doing some birding in Palo Verde National Park, and visiting some mangroves.

Tomorrow we will collecting, identifying, and drawing conclusions from bioindicative macroinvertebrates, which basically means mucking around in some nearby streams and collecting bugs (hooray!)  Sure beats the hell out of pounding three cups of coffee through four hours of lectures.  And then on Saturday we go to a reserve for another day hike to learn about plant dispersal/pollination mechanisms and play in a waterfall.  Experiential learning is the best education.  I often find myself discouraged with the daily word/talk grind and the routines of university life.  As one of my favorite poets/authors, Jim Harrison, once wrote, "Why cast Robert Redford in your life story if all he's going to do is sit there and piss and moan at the typewriter for two hours in expensive Eastman color?"  This semester is already proving to be a healthy and refreshing break from the mental infrastructure and verbal gymnastics of ivory tower academia.

Clamming in a mangrove > pontificating on the Freudian implications of 19th century British literature

This will likely be my last post for two weeks or so, as I will have little to no computer access on our trip, but I'll likely have plenty to relate via interweb upon our return.  Here's to the quick onset of spring for all of you in the temperate stretches of los Estados Unidos.  Pura vida!

Update: I just got back from Supercompro, where I purchased a few trip items.  One of said items was a slim bottle of organic rosemary shampoo!  How awesome is that?  Just goes to show that there are many untapped market niches just waiting to be exploited for marginal gain.  Take heart, entrepreneurs one and all!  Expect it to hit shelves in the U.S. by 2012, because let's be honest, how could a product with such universal appeal NOT leap to international market domination?  All kidding aside, I am looking forward to using this shampoo.  I love the smell of rosemary, and we often put sprigs on our stoves during the bitter homestead winter to spruce up the cabins.  Now I get a chance to lather my hair with it!